Fourth Comings (3 page)

four

I
don’t hear the
click-click-click
of the lock.

Or see the door opening.

Or Young Natty’s parents getting a clear, Kama Sutra view of you neck-deep in my nether regions.

“Ohhhhhhhmaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!”

“Jayyyyyyysuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhsssss!!!!!!!!!!!!”

I freak
(“OOOOOHHHHHFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!”)
and scramble under the sheets. You calmly remove yourself from my crotch and cover up with a pillow.

If you recall, when I walked in on my own parents catching lumpy humps on the couch at their condo a few years back, I still had the presence of mind to put aside my gut-churning horror and slam the door shut on the image that would haunt me for the rest of my life. In this dramatic scenario, Young Natty’s parents don’t have the sense to shut the door. No, they gawk and gawk and gawk some more, as if we are the first humans in recorded history to do what we are doing, as if no one before us has ever thought to unite mouth and vagina for the purposes of female pleasure, as if we have, in fact, just put our perverted minds and bodies together to invent the act of cunnilingus. And can you blame them? Because sometimes it
does
feel as if we have invented it and all intimacies. Our bodies surging and retreating in innumerable positions and countless combinations for us and us alone…

I imagine Dr. and Mrs. still
just standing there,
with no sign of bringing the awkwardness to its desperate end. No, only you can do that.

“Dr. and Mrs. Addison,” you say in a surprisingly dignified tone considering the only thing separating Young Natty’s parents from your formidable boner is a small foam-filled pillow that, quite frankly, is not up to the task. “Would you mind leaving us alone?”

I’m awestruck by your ability to collect yourself so quickly. But then I remember how my parents were so shamelessly unflustered when they reopened the door with their clothes on. I take this as a cue that those responsible for the interruptus have more reason to be embarrassed than those engaged in the coitus. Dr. and Mrs. Addison reach a similar conclusion and suddenly get all tangled up in a flurry of apologetic “Pahdons” and “Ahm so sorrys” as they make their (belatedly) hasty retreat from the room.

Young Natty gets much mileage out of the “On My First Day of College My Parents Busted My Roommate Going to Town on His Girlfriend” story. As a getting-to-know-you gambit on campus, that story is tough to beat. And just when the story starts getting old at Princeton, and he’s told everyone he can possibly tell, he recycles it for his high school friends when he returns to Alabama on breaks. Oh yes. Such a tale can be told many times over.

five

B
ut that’s not what happened. That dramatic scenario only exists in my mind. (And now in this notebook.) As it really happened, the erotic interlude ended not dramatically at all, but modestly, with a whisper.

“Jessica?”

You had fully extracted yourself from my body and were sitting up in the sheets. I had no idea how long you’d been sitting like that, looking at me. You were slightly out of breath, and when the exhalation hit my face, my stomach twisted in recognition of the brackish scent I knew as my own. I turned my head away, disgusted.

I’d already decided that when I returned to Brooklyn, I would tell Hope this story, the real one, in its entirety. I wouldn’t even censor the nasty bits. I’ve always refrained from discussing the most delicate details of our sex life because my love for you transcended dishy fuck-and-telling. But there was already a shift in my brain that said,
Nothing is sacred anymore.

So I couldn’t fall back on a histrionic deal breaker like the previously described dramatic scenario. I had to rely on the truth.

“I don’t think I can do this.”

You rested in the sheets, eyes closed, mouth open just wide enough to slip a pinkie finger inside. I couldn’t see the airflow, no telltale rippling of nose hairs, but I imagined that you were breathing in one nostril and out the other like a master yogi.

“I don’t think I can do this,” I repeated in a momentary lapse of courage.

One eye winked open to give me a look that asked, without actually asking,
You can’t do what?

“I can’t…”

“You can’t do what?” you said, this time out loud.

(If you had any idea what I was about to say, it didn’t show in your eyes. And I was looking carefully. Did you know? I was searching for a hint anywhere on your face that revealed that you’d seen this coming. That you, too, thought it was inevitable and the best thing to do under the circumstances. But all I saw was you, unexpecting, and eager to hear what I’d say next.)

“I can’t be…”

The words hung there, suspended by an argument-in-progress that passed under the open window.

“Ninja, dude.
Ninja.”

“But, dude, wait. Seriously. What if…?”

“What if I don’t give a shit?
Ninja.”

“What if they fought on the open sea?”

“For the love of fuck! A NINJA WILL KICK A PIRATE’S SWASHBUCKLING ASS EVERY GODDAMN TIME.”

I paused. It wasn’t the dramatic scenario I’d had in mind, but it would suffice. This overheard inanity perfectly supported what I was about to say.

“I can’t be the girlfriend of a college freshman.”

You considered this for a moment. Your smile dimmed but had not faded entirely from your face.

“Jessica, you’d be the girlfriend of…” You pursed your lips in contemplation before finishing. “Me.” Then your face crumpled under the awkwardness of the phrase. Was this the longest sentence you’d uttered all day? All week? In a month? Eight months?

“And
you
are a college freshman,” I said. “A twenty-three-year-old college freshman.”

“That’s not all I am.”

“Of course that’s not all you are,” I said. “But it’s going to be a big part of who you are until next year, when you’re a twenty-four-year-old college sophomore, until the year after that, when you’re a twenty-five-year-old junior—”

“I understand, Jessica.”

“I don’t think you do.” And then more firmly: “You don’t.”

And you sucked in your breath as if you had just been tackled by someone twice your size.

“I know what’s going to happen here, Marcus.”

“You do?”

“Yes,” I said, “I do.”

“Enlighten me,” you said with a tease to your tone.

“You’re going to find that there’s a certain cachet to being the old guy on campus.”

“Jessica…”

“Seriously, Marcus, you’ll get a campus nickname. Like ‘the Buddha’ or something. And when you walk around campus, other first-years from Outdoor Action will point you out, like, ‘Hey, there goes the Buddha. He’s twenty-three years old and he’s a freshman.’ And everyone will be really interested in the whole Marcus mythology and how you ended up here. Like, ‘Hey, did you know that the Buddha meditates twice a day? And he did this silent meditation where he didn’t speak to anyone for like
years,
including six months on a ranch in Death Valley? And he screwed his way through high school and was like this undiscovered genius, and oh shit, yeah, I almost forgot, he spent time in drug rehab when he was like seventeen, and he’s just like the coolest fucking dude, you know?’”

I knew I was right. It wouldn’t take much to become a legend here on this preppy little campus in this quaint little town. Columbia is in New York City, a place that isn’t exactly lacking in distinctive characters. While I was there, a guy known as Bathrobe Boy gained notoriety simply because he couldn’t be bothered to get dressed for class. Then there were the Carman Twins, who achieved no small measure of campus popularity simply because—you guessed it—they were genetically identical. And you certainly had a lot more noteworthy and/or notorious aspects of your personal history to get tongues wagging.

But you were unmoved. You fiddled with the silver ring hanging from the leather string around your neck. You pressed it over your eye and wore it like a monocle as you read the hidden words soldered inside:
MY THOUGHTS CREATE MY WORLD.
You had made it with your own hands, out of an old quarter.

Finally you spoke.

“I’m not a Buddhist. I’m a deist who practices Vipassana meditation.”

“Buddhist! Deist! Whatever!”

“Are you drunk?”

“No,” I said too quickly. “Maybe.”

You sighed. “I tasted it when we kissed.”

I felt guilty, knowing that the only alcohol you’ve touched since sobering up at seventeen is that which stubbornly clings to my own tongue. Your observation was apropos of nothing. And, well, everything. And so I responded with another non sequitur.

“Why Princeton? Why now?”

I had wanted to ask this question since late last January, when you first told me about your acceptance.

“It’s one of the best schools in the world. And I’m not too far from my parents, and with my dad…”

My gaze dropped to the floor, as it always did when you mentioned your dad, which wasn’t often.

You continued with a shrug of your shoulders. “So why not?”

“I can think of many reasons why not,” I replied. “It doesn’t make any sense that you’re going here.”

“I got in. It makes sense.”

You smoked out most of your brain cells before you were seventeen years old, and yet you still have enough left over to outscore 99 percent of standardized-test takers. (Myself included.) And your, shall we say, untraditional background must have appealed to Princeton’s admissions officers, who have been trying for years to undo the school’s reputation for being a bastion of WASPiness. And they succeeded, according to the headline in one of the local papers:
CLASS OF
2010
MOST DIVERSE IN UNIVERSITY HISTORY.
And yet if Dude and his friends are a fair representation, it’s a homogenous kind of diversity, which makes you a shoo-in for next year’s catalog. It will be you, a dark-skinned female, an Asian male, and another female blinging a Star of David—a multicultural quartet clutching weighty academic tomes and rocking tiger-themed finery on loan from the bookstore.

So yes, you were accepted early decision to the number one school in the nation when applications were at an all-time high. You deserve to be there. But, as you know, that’s not what I meant about not making sense.

“You being here is like an extensive form of performance art. Like you’re going to be
‘Marcus Flutie, twenty-three-year-old Princeton freshman.’
In italics, wrapped in quotations.”

You rested your head against the pine-paneled wall. “Don’t we all live our life in italics, wrapped in quotations?”

I thought about Jenn-with-Two-N’s.

“Well, I don’t think I like this version of me,” I said. “The one in which I’m your
old
girlfriend, old in both meanings of the word.”

“You’re not old.”

“To these eighteen-year-olds I am! I’m like a campus cougar….” I curled my hands into claws and
grrrrrrrowled.
“Prowling Princeton for some hot young tiger tail.”

Your abdominal muscles squeezed and released in low-belly laughter.

“And you won’t want to visit me because you hate the city.”

You opened your mouth to protest, but I wouldn’t let you.

“You know it’s true! It
is
true. You hate the noise. The dirt. The pace. You were miserable whenever you visited me in the city….”

“I had other reasons to be miserable.”

“I know,” I lied.

six

T
he truth is, I don’t know much about your misery at all.

You knew all about your dad’s illness when you miraculously reappeared on my parents’ doorstep last Christmas Eve—the proverbial lost shepherd in a wool peacoat and ski hat—almost two years to the day since I’d last seen or spoken to you. You knew all about it when we made love less than twenty-four hours after that reunion. You knew about it four days later when Hope and I departed for our monthlong road trip.

In retrospect, there was something tentative about the way you handed over my going-away gift. I was struck then by your shyness, something in the way your eyes skimmed the sidewalk, the sad, downward slope of your shoulders as you presented the red raw silk box containing this blank notebook and eleven others, the Death Valley diaries, filled with your observations of life in the desert without me. I had assumed you were grieving a little bit about me, over saying good-bye again so soon after our sweet reunion. But I was wrong. Your morose mood had nothing to do with me, but with the secret of your father’s sickness, which you only reluctantly revealed upon my return. I can’t understand why you waited, or why you have rarely spoken of it since.

So I was lying when I said I knew why you were so miserable. I have no idea what it’s been like for you for the past eight months, living at home in Pineville, helping your parents cope with the diagnosis and its aftermath. I don’t know because you wouldn’t tell me.

seven

Y
ou hadn’t made a move. Sun sliced through spaces in the blinds, and the light slashed in diagonals across your naked torso.

“You keep encouraging me to tread the middle path, but I know from our past that you, Marcus Flutie, are an all-or-nothing proposition for me.” I cleared my throat. “I’m tired of only seeing you a few weekends a month. I don’t want that kind of relationship anymore.”

You gave yourself a few moments of deep breathing before finally responding.

“You don’t want to visit on the weekends.”

“No.”

“Then move here and be with me every day.” You clasped your hands behind your head. Problem solved.

“Move?” I snorted.
“Here?”

“We can live off campus—”

I cut him off. “I’m not giving up my life in New York just to be your girlfriend. I’ve finished college, Marcus. And if I wanted to relive the experience, I would have applied to grad school.”

(I am a liar. And a bad one at that. I would love to relive the experience. I am desperately envious of everyone who is currently living or reliving the experience.)

There was a pause. Then a puckish smile played on your lips. “You say you can’t be the girlfriend of a college freshman.”

“Right.”

“There’s another choice.”

“I know,” I said sadly. “Which is why I made this difficult decision….”

“Another
choice.”

And that’s when you slipped out of bed, got down on one knee, and took my left hand in yours.

“Don’t move here just to be my girlfriend,” you said.

You pulled the leather necklace over your head and slid the silver ring onto my fourth finger. Then you said two words I never I imagined I’d hear from anyone, let alone Marcus Flutie.

“Marry me,” you said.

These are the most absurd words I have ever heard.